Pavilion no. 15

22 June last once again brought the 15th ritual opening of a temporary pavilion commissioned by the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Kensington Gardens. Before an audience of local and international TV and press cameras, the architects engaged to design this year’s venue for the museum’s packed talk schedule posed for the customary photographs in front of the structure, still wet with white paint on the floor and adhesive tape in the structural joins.  

2015 is José Selgas and Lucia Cano’s turn and they are far less high-flown names than Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist have accustomed us to in years past. We shall only know for sure whether this is a change of tack (a suggestion supported by last year’s choice of “minor” and “emerging” architect Smiljan Radic) after we see the subsequent curator choices. The fact is that the Serpentine phenomenon is not far from coming of age and it is legitimate to believe that the initiative’s promoters are starting to wonder what comes next.

Some of the already numerous reviews posted on social media and architecture websites have focused on this aspect, even proposing (as stated on The Guardian’s website) a shift of intentions from a temporary pavilion/ object to something more socially useful (a bus shelter, a children’s playground, classrooms). These and other similar comments raise a key question on the approach to the “temporary summer pavilion” phenomenon/event. In other words, people are questioning whether the constructed and tangible result should be judged merely as an object, expressing a need to reflect on the very meaning of the operation 15 years after it was launched and, more importantly, asking how long it can last. Basically: how many more pavilions will be built in Kensington Gardens? Is the temporary nature of the structures in line with the temporary nature of the initiative?

When read from the standpoint of the pure object, some of the Internet comments on SelgasCano’s pavilion suggest that the programme is beginning to look like it is running out of breath. Some have, without mincing their words, called it the “worst Serpentine Gallery Pavilion ever.” Why? The reasons could probably all come under the heading of an unclear statement of intent. Indeed, it is not apparent whether they wanted to try out a new material or construction technique, or develop a particularly complex spatial configuration (or, as is usually the case, a combination of all three). Apart from the doubling of the building’s skin to create routes parallel to the two main directions (intersecting to form an almost circular space for the public of events planned for the summer), none of these questions seems to have a completely affirmative answer.

The essence of the structure designed by the Spanish office seems to be a rejection of stasis. The simplest description of the Pavilion is that it is a crossroads; the space lends itself to being passed through but is reluctant to be occupied for long periods. In this sense, the Pavilion fits perfectly with the growing need for leisure spaces of immediate consumption. An experience that lasts just long enough for visitors to enter the tent; pause for a few moments to observe the colour changes produced by the refraction of the sun’s rays on the ETFE membrane (a fluorine-based polymer) stretched – in an explicit declaration of imperfect construction – between the white-painted metal doorways that, by all being different from each other, strive to add complexity to what is, actually, so extremely simple a space as to verge on the banal; and find themselves – perhaps partly driven by the far from ideal climatic conditions inside the tent – out in the open in the park once more.

The simple elegance of the 2009 Pavilion designed by Sanaa – a canopy roof resting on slender tubular metal that was also manifestly primarily a space of free passage – gives way here to a jarring ambiguity between the excess colour and form, and the limited spatial possibilities offered by the Spanish architects’ Pavilion. Architects who – as conveyed by the curators on the Serpentine website – were chosen partly for their proven ability to design “playful” spaces that are light spirited. Perhaps, there is nothing wrong in failing to deliver an earnestly academic specimen, at least for a temporary pavilion.

However, it is equally legitimate to wonder whether this playfulness is not, ultimately, just a permutation of control architecture for the era of the immediate and the ephemeral. Visitors are kept docile by stimulating their most infantile urges and, to this end, the SelgasCano Pavilion seems to be an almost perfect machine. For proof of this, simply visit the pavilion a second time and observe how it stimulates the most unlikely poses in today’s all-photographer public.

Truly, the designers have stated loud and clear that this year’s Pavilion was designed for the Instagram population and it is in the infinite multiplicity of gazes allowed by the cameras now present in every technological gadget that the Pavilion is redeemed from the negative comments of those with perhaps a more disciplinary (architectural) critical intent and who lament the lack of design thought and inadequate construction; and the positive comments of those who praise an innate British DNA of Archigram memory.

Perhaps more explicitly than ever before in the history of the initiative launched by the Serpentine, the 2015 Pavilion declares that it is intended for a far broader public than architecture experts alone. Practising architects, academics, critics and the student population which makes its pilgrimage here every year are only marginal beneficiaries of an initiative that seeks to capture the spirit of its times, when the public – largely thanks to the seemingly unlimited force of opinion offered by new social media – also becomes the client. It is more with this scattered and invisible clientele than with the concrete one of curators and sponsors that the Pavilion wishes to deal, exploding the myth linked to the transient architecture of the Expos, fairs etc., by which it is the sanctuary of the architect, offering a chance to accomplish one’s ambitions at the point of confluence between formal and technological experimentation in conditions far removed from the contingencies of reality – availing, that is, of a relaxation of the heavy mechanisms that govern “real” architecture. José Selgas has been explicit to this effect, pointing out that this was not at all a carte-blanche commission.

Rather than live in a parallel reality that is more permissive than that of “real” architecture, this year’s Serpentine Pavilion clearly wants to live in a hyper-reality comprising countless clients. On the one hand, it can therefore be read as a response that is clearly a child of its times but, on the other, it is good to know that the SelgasCano Pavilion is not a concentration of the office’s design abilities. When all is said and done, it is hard, outside the perfect reality of Instagram, not to classify it as one of the architecturally less convincing results of an initiative that has now been swallowed up by all the innumerable “events” of the architectural world and, actually, it should perhaps be rethought. 

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